I wailed against Tomašis’s hand, so he wadded up a corner of Gran’s shawl and stuffed it into my mouth. He fed it to me until I choked, and I bit down on his fingers, relishing in his startled cry. The rebellion cost me. He thrust me to the ground, his knee on my spine as he ground my face into the dirt. I kicked, furious and terrified as he wrenched my arms behind my back, tearing the scarf from my throat to wind around my wrists. He pulled it so tight I couldn’t feel my fingers.
I closed my eyes and groaned into my gag. I wanted Gran. I wanted her to save us with magic and fury, but they’d taken away her hawk feather. She’d likely seen the trouble, but she hadn’t seen where they’d dragged us, and with wheat and barley everywhere, it would be hard to discern one field from the next. I had to believe she’d come, though. I had to believe the nightmare would end. She’d told me I’d make it through the night of the blood moon.
But in how many pieces?
“What now? Just wait?” Mander tilted his face up, his hand wiping Martyn’s blood off his chin.
Tomašis climbed off me, his booted foot pressed to my neck to keep me still. I shrieked my displeasure, but he pretended he didn’t hear. “Silas said he’d meet us.”
Mander glanced down the field, scanning for Silas’s approach. “You see that scarecrow back there? It was looking at us. Unnatural.”
“It’s a scarecrow. Nothing to worry about.”
“Didn’t say I was worried. Said it’s just not right-looking.” Mander stopped talking long enough to pull something from his pocket. My eyes were so heavy with tears that I couldn’t make out what it was, but then my nose filled with the familiar, too-sweet smell of tobacco. He stuffed his cheek full of leaf before sliding the tin container back into his pocket.
Minutes. Longer minutes. Tomašis was quiet, but Mander was restless. He paced, he sighed, he nudged Martyn with his toe until Martyn groaned. “Got an idea,” he said eventually.
“Oh?”
“While we wait for Silas. Follow me.”
“We’re better off hiding here.”
“Trust me.” Mander hefted Martyn under the arms to drag him back. Tomašis hauled me along by my boots, my stomach raking over uneven terrain, small rocks and broken wheat stalks scraping my neck and chest. We stopped not long after, Tomašis dropping my legs to help Mander with something.
Run, I thought. You should run.
But I was gagged and bound and too dizzy to push myself up to my knees. My front ached. My back screamed from the beating. My face was bruised from Silas’s punch and my scalp tingled from all the hair pulling. I was well and truly bested. I breathed into the dirt, wishing I could make myself invisible.
A whoomph sounded beside me, and I turned my head to see that Thomson had been thrown from his hooks. I’d never liked the scarecrow, but the hay spilling from his sides and the burlap head separated from his overalls felt irreverent somehow.
Mander lifted Martyn as best he could, grunting under the considerable weight.
“Help me. He’s a fat one,” he said to Tomašis.
There wasn’t an ounce of fat on Martyn Woodard. He was big and solid and strong from his farm work, but I couldn’t say so. Couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. All I could do was watch helplessly as they raised Martyn toward Thomson’s menacing, rusty hooks. They propped him up in Thomson’s stead, two hooks under his arms, two under his thighs. The ones in his legs dug into his pants and cut into his flesh, but the boys didn’t care.
This was their revenge, the revenge Silas would have told them to exact.
Martyn sagged on his perch. He wasn’t dead, but there was little doubt he teetered ever closer to that dark precipice. He let out a plaintive moan before his head flopped to the side, as still as Thomson had been in the same position minutes ago. I watched his chest and counted the breaths and the seconds in between. Each time, the count seemed to dwindle.
He was dying.
They’ve murdered someone for the crime of being kind to me.
I screamed into my gag, shaking my head back and forth as fresh terror took hold. While Mander and Tomašis were still preoccupied, I rolled my body into the wheat. I was unable to find my feet or walk, but I was so desperate to get to my grandmother, to get help for Martyn, that I’d inch along like a worm if I had to.
Then six black boots blocked my path. Silas, Cam, and Brishen stood side by side, all of them winded and flushed from running. I glanced up. Silas peered down at me, then up at Martyn on the hooks, and a delighted smile stretched across his lips. I could tell he relished this moment, stepping over me to examine Mander’s grim work. I yelled into my gag again, and Cam kicked my flank in warning.
“He’s not dead,” Silas announced, his disappointment evident. “He lingers like a bad smell.” Silas punched Martyn’s bloodied middle with all his might, but Martyn made no sound of protest. He gave no indication of feeling even as his body jolted on the hooks. If some piece of Martyn was in there still, he had faded to a place where pain could no longer find him.
It was, perhaps, the only mercy he’d seen that night.
I closed my eyes and prayed, not to God or the spirits, but to Gran. She’d come. I knew she’d come, even if she had to check every field in Wales to find me. She moved slowly, but she moved surely, and if she rallied others to her side, they’d be there soon. The camp was only ten minutes away. The hawk’s eye had, at the very least, told her I’d been taken on my way back from town. She could narrow down my whereabouts, especially if she’d caught sight of Thomson’s post.
Gran. Help. Please.
As if in response, a biting wind shredded through the field, tearing through my clothes. Goose pimples appeared on my arms and legs. I tucked my knees into my middle, trying to ignore my body’s aches as I willed Gran to avenge me in the field.
Faster, faster.
“What do you want to do with him?” Tomašis asked, shouting to be heard over the banshee-like gusts of wind.
“Leave him for the crows. They’ll take his eyes and pull the meat from his bones. A proper pig funeral.” Silas crouched before me, a blood-crusted hand sliding beneath my chin to tilt my face. His nose was still swollen from Martyn’s punch. A small scrape marred his chin. He pulled the shawl from my mouth, pinching my cheeks so hard my lips puckered like a fish’s. “What to do with you? Whoring yourself out to a farmer. Were you so eager for a man?”
He thrust me away and motioned to his friends. Brishen and Cam lifted me, their arms looping around mine as they pulled me to my feet. They turned me to face Martyn, and I jerked my gaze away. A hand plunged into my hair and made a fist, forcing my head back.
Silas prowled around me like a starving lion. “Do you see? This is what happens to those who cross me.” He stopped behind me, his hand stroking over my hip to toy with the ends of my disheveled braid. I struggled, desperate to escape his touch, but Brishen’s and Cam’s grips were true.
The wind howled even louder, making the wheat crop shimmy in a frantic dance. That was when I heard it—her—a harsh, gravelly voice screeching its despair.
“I come, I come,” the wind promised.
I saw Silas had heard it, too. His brows shot upward. “Who’s there?” he demanded.
“I will find you. I am in the fields!”
The voice was distinct enough that the boys whipped their heads around in search of its owner. There was another blast, and another, but the display wasn’t for me. It was for them—a warning. A curse. A promise.
Mander spun as if he expected to find my grandmother standing behind us in the field. Tomašis looked like he might be ill. The blood moon shone down upon his face, revealing a scared, bewildered boy who realized too late that the monster was coming and he had nowhere to hide.
“Have you heard that voice before, Tomašis?” I taunted him. “Did you dream the dark dreams with that sound in your ears?” I had no business being so brave, but words were all I had.
“Shut your lying mouth,” Silas snarled behind me.
“She comes for you, too, Silas. She comes and you know what she brings.”
Silas grunted, and the hand that had been toying with my hair yanked, and the end of the braid came undone, a stray curl pulled so hard that it tore from my head. The blood came hard and quick, dribbling over my scalp and trickling along my hairline and cheek. I throbbed. I ached. I suffered in almost every way, but I gritted my teeth against the pain, stronger knowing that Gran was there—if not in body, then in spirit.
“Silas, we should go,” Tomašis insisted, nearly jumping from his skin as the wind writhed around him, the wheat an endless, hissing witness. “We don’t want to cross the old woman. We should go.”
“I will not be put off by parlor tricks or superstition,” Silas spat. “I am the chieftain’s son. I am not a fool!”
My eyes met Tomašis’s, and despite the pain in my face, I forced my brightest smile as tendrils of my loosed braid started to whirl around my face in the wind. “She’s coming for you, Tomašis. For all of you.”
Tomašis ran as if Hell itself had been unleashed. He shoved his way past his friends and jumped the fence railing, abandoning us all to the threat of the drabarni. Silas shouted his name and demanded he return, but Tomašis was either too far to hear or too afraid to heed.
“Do you think you’re clever? Scaring him?” Silas stalked around to shove the shawl back into my mouth, grabbing my cheeks and shaking my head back and forth until my vision spiraled. “Look at me, Bethan. Look at me!”
I refused, casting my eyes to the blood moon above. It was full and golden and hung low in a blanket of never-ending stars. How could it be so beautiful when what happened beneath it was so ugly?
“You will mind, girl. You will mind. Hold her up.”
Cam and Brishen stood me up tall, but their expressions were strained now, their eyes panicked. They were no longer so sure of Silas and his plan, but they’d come too far to leave at the last bell toll.
By contrast, Mander leaned against Martyn’s pole like he had no cares, periodically spitting out wads of tobacco. His arms were folded across his lean chest, one of his legs crossed over the other. He grinned at me, the smile distorted around the lump in his cheek. I looked down, not wanting to meet his gaze.
Silas rustled with the fabric of my skirt, but it wasn’t until his hands pulled my skirt up around my waist that I understood what he was about. I screamed into my gag, my legs buckling, but the boys held me firm, one of them thrusting a knee between my thighs.
The wind promised wrath. Its wail stood in for my own voice, its gusts for my rage. My hair billowed past my face. The wheat stalks around us snapped in half like they’d been stomped to the ground by a marauding titan.
It was not supposed to happen—it could not happen—except it would, and it did. Beneath the blood moon, Silas Roberts stood in the shadow of a giant. The crow had fallen in the guise of a felled scarecrow, and despite my struggling, despite my screams and protests, a pale serpent slithered into warm, deep earth.
My heart was cold like stone.
I stood motionless as Silas pulled himself from me, my skirt falling down to my ankles. The wind blew so hard I should have floated away like a feather, but I did not stir. I kept my eyes fixed upon Martyn’s broken body, but I did not see. I did not weep for what was lost because I did not feel.
Silas walked around from behind me, adjusting his trousers. His face was blotched from exertion, beads of sweat dotting his brow. I didn’t scream when he removed my gag. I didn’t flinch when he trailed his fingers over my cheek and down over the scratches on my chest to press his palm against my gut. His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “We’d have strong children, I think.”
The wind blasted again, so hard the four boys staggered. Brishen and Cam had to let me go to keep their balance, and both crouched low against the gale. Silas rocked back on his heels and Mander clung to Martyn’s pole to anchor himself. Somehow, perhaps by Gran’s magic or my own resolve, I held strong, my spine straight as if it, too, had gone to stone. I could hear Gran everywhere, whirling and snarling around me, her voice filling the vast darkness.
Before, her approach comforted me. Now I couldn’t even muster relief. I was dead inside.
“We should go before there’s trouble,” Cam said, looking unsettled for the first time that night. As his eyes scoured the wheat field, his palms swept down the front of his trousers to wipe away sweat that shouldn’t have been there on a chilly autumn night.
Silas waved the boys to the fence. “Go. I’ll follow.”
After they’d gone, Silas stepped close to me and placed his hands on my shoulders, his thumbs brushing along the sides of my neck. I didn’t look at him, so he cupped my chin and tilted my face up to catch my eye.
“There are two choices, Bethan. You walk to the caravan by my side, or I leave you with the diddicoy and you wait for him to die. Don’t be stupid.”
I didn’t answer, but held my ground. Frustrated, he pinched my cheek, digging his nails in, and when that didn’t spur a reaction, he shoved me to the ground. I landed hard on my hip. There was pain, but I didn’t cry out. I recognized the trauma, I knew my body suffered, but I didn’t feel connected to it; it was foreign. By defiling me, he’d removed me from my own hurt.
It was not me that had been beaten and compromised. It was she, and in that moment, she was not me. I just lived in her skin.
Silas loomed over me still. “Dumb sow. Rot with the farmer if that’s what you want. You deserve each other.” He spat, and the gob landed on my cheek and dribbled down my neck. Then he stomped away from me and pressed through the wheat, vaulting the fence to join Brishen, Mander, and Cam.
I listened for a long time, hearing the rustle of their bodies through the wheat, the pounding of their boots when they hit the dirt road, and finally, silence.
I rolled onto my back to peer at Martyn on his hooks. He was too still, though every few seconds I thought I saw his shirt flutter. It wasn’t the wind’s doing—that had disappeared with the boys—so maybe there was something left of him after all.
I wanted to hope, but stone didn’t know how to hope.
A distinct drag-shuffle gait drew my attention from the pole. Gran approached from the belly of the wheat. She carried no lantern or torch, but I could tell she was close when her voice rang out like a bell. “This way. This way!”
“Coming, Drina. I cannot see.”
The chieftain.
“Move faster. She’s near. Bethan!”
I wanted to cry out, to tell her to come to the scarecrow’s perch, but the words tangled around my tongue. I breathed deep and closed my eyes, willing my body to respond to my commands. It was not mine in those moments, but hers—the other’s—and she was intent on finding the deep, quiet place where there was no hurt.
The crop rustled near my feet. I rolled my head to it, expecting to see Gran hunched over her walking stick, but the chieftain found me first, his horrified gaze swinging from Martyn on the pole to me on the ground, my hands tied behind my back.
“He couldn’t. He didn’t—” He covered his mouth, his words cooperating no more than mine had. What he didn’t see, and what I plainly saw from where I lay upon that cold ground, was the inevitability of it all. He’d made excuse upon excuse for his boy. He’d dismissed Silas’s misdeeds as rambunctious. A tousle of the hair instead of a sharp word. The chieftain hadn’t held me down while his son violated me, but he was complicit in my attack in his fashion.
Clearing his throat, he called out into the field, “This way! I’ve found her.”
I heard more wheat snapping as Gran trundled our way. She appeared beside the chieftain, standing at his elbow. Her back was hunched over, and her hair, free of its bun, slithered over her shoulders.
Gran peered down at me where I lay on the knitted shawl she’d given me. Her gaze traveled from one end of me to the other, assessing the hurt. Her head swung up to the young man on the hooks. She lifted her cane and poked Martyn, but got no r
esponse.
“Help me down,” she growled at the chieftain.
He offered Gran his arm so she could lower herself to my side. Her joints popped as she settled beside me. Seeing Silas’s spit, she lifted her hand to my face but paused short of contact, like she was afraid I’d burst apart with the touch, a dandelion given over to seed.
“May I? I do not want to…After what happened, I do not…” She drew in a ragged breath. We were so close that I could see the redness around her nostrils and the dew at the corners of her eyes. Had Gran cried for me? In all our years together, I’d never seen her shed a tear, and yet it was all over her face. I could hear it in the wetness of her breaths.
I rejected the touch and rolled over to expose my wrists instead, showing her the binding so she could loosen it. The scarf pulled away and blood rushed to my fingers, which throbbed as if I’d dunked them in boiling water. I climbed to my knees, waiting for the world to stop its relentless spiral, before cleansing my own cheek.
Gran’s hand glided over my hair, a gentle petting that was her affectionate gesture of choice during a rare soft moment, but it reminded me too much of Silas fondling it before he tugged a hunk out. I wanted her to stop. I needed her to stop. I swatted her away with a hiss.
“Of course. I am sorry.” She motioned for the chieftain to help her stand. He lifted her, cradling her against his chest like a baby before righting her, his hands supporting her elbows until she steadied.
He reached his hand out to me as well, but I didn’t take it. I said nothing, shoving myself to my feet and bracing against the vertigo. I extended my arms to either side of my body for balance, until the whirling slowed and eventually stopped. I wadded my skirt to wipe the seed from my legs, not caring that the chieftain could see my bare skin. I had no idea if he turned his face away so I wouldn’t dishonor him, or so he wouldn’t dishonor me.
The Hollow Girl Page 10